Nordling Says Chris Evans Is Terrific In PUNCTURE!

Nordling Says Chris Evans Is Terrific In PUNCTURE!

Published at:  Sep 19, 2011 12:41:22 PM CDT

Nordling here.

Vicky (Vinessa Shaw) is a young mother and nurse in Houston.  She’s raising her two small children and juggling single motherhood with her job.  She’s proud of her career, and she loves helping people.  One day in ER, a young drug addict goes into seizures, and Vicky attempts to inject him with a sedative.  But as she withdraws the needle from him, his spasms accidentally cause the needle to go into her finger.  She runs to get the wound disinfected but it’s too late – Vicky’s been infected with HIV.

Thus begins PUNCTURE, a legal thriller but also a character study of one of the more intriguing attorneys I’ve seen portrayed in film – Chris Evans’ Mike Weiss.  Based on true events, when Weiss and his partner Paul Danzinger (co-director Mark Kassen) sit down with Vicky three years later, the HIV has already taken hold.  But she doesn’t want to sue the hospital – she’s being taken care of with worker’s compensation.  What she wants is for her friend Jeffrey Dancort (an excellent Marshall Bell) to get his new invention into hospitals.  Dancort has invented a needle that withdraws when injected and can only be used once.  Called “Safety Point”, the needle could prevent over 800,000 accidental needle sticks by hospital staff a year, potentially saving thousands of lives.  But Dancort can’t even get in the door to most hospitals with his invention – a giant group purchasing organization has a monopoly on all sales of syringes.  Thus Dancort wants to bring a lawsuit that would open up those markets.

The law firm of Weiss and Danzinger makes its money on the practical, accident and injury cases, but Weiss has passion and zeal, and wants to be David to the GPO’s Goliath.  Danzinger is reluctant; with a new baby on the way and the bills piling up, he’s not willing to risk the law film that the two best friends have had together since graduating law school.  But against his better judgment, Danzinger agrees to take the case, as long as Weiss helps out with the bacon and eggs cases that are the source of their income.  It becomes evident very quickly that Weiss and Danzinger are in over their heads, as a very successful attorney, Nathaniel Price (Brett Cullen) manages to influence the legal and business community in Houston to avoid their law firm like the plague.

Then there’s the matter of Mike Weiss’s drug problem.  Weiss is a huge addict, doing cocaine, heroin, pills, sex - anything that he can get his hands on.  It was manageable in the early years, but once Weiss’s wife leaves him, it spirals out of control, threatening to bring the case and his law firm down.  But Weiss, for all his problems, has his heart in the right place – he despises bullies, and he sees a bully pushing down a smaller kid in the Safety Point case.  Weiss pushes through to catch that most elusive of ideals, justice.

Chris Evans is amazing as Mike Weiss.  His performance goes beyond the clichéd drug abuser – the film never gives a reason why Weiss has his addictions.  There are no inner demons that he’s trying to kill, no terrible incident in his past that the film points to to give some kind of motivation for his abuse – Weiss is simply a man who constantly needs stimulation, whether through drugs, sex, or the thrill of a high-stakes lawsuit.  You feel sympathy for him, but it’s not a sympathy born out of his situation – Weiss is a genuinely good person for the most part, but he lives such a fast life that he almost has to stay doped up to even function.  When he’s coming down from a high, the film shows his world as blurred, in slow motion, and it’s only when he finds that boost when his world becomes interesting again.  Most Hollywood films have to dig up some sort of clue as to why a drug addict continues to be an addict – but for Weiss it’s simply a part of the architecture of his life, and to take it away would be like taking away one of the walls holding his roof up.  Evans never plays for sympathy here – it’s a real, true, honest portrayal and he knocks it out of the park.

Evans is so good, in fact, that sometimes the film can’t keep up with him.  Shot on a low budget in the Houston area, PUNCTURE is well directed by Adam and Mark Kassen, but I can’t help but feel that the film would have been better served by a more classical directing style.  But the performances they get from their actors are across the board good – Marshall Bell, especially, as the cranky inventor of the Safety Point.  Dancort isn’t about trying to be popular – he wants his product in hospitals to save lives, not make money, and it’s the only way he can honor his friend Vicky.  But he’s being thwarted at every turn, and Dancort is a caustic, bitter man at the point the film catches up with him, and Bell doesn’t play Dancort for sympathy.  He may have good intentions and goals, but he can’t grease the wheels to make his product successful because he just doesn’t get along with or like people all that much.  Brett Cullen plays attorney Chase as all charm and smiles, but with Machiavellian intentions.  Michael Biehn appears as a whistleblower with some vital bit of information, and he’s very good and makes an impression even though he only has two scenes in the film.

The Kassens’ background in the medical field (their mother was a nurse and their father a pharmacist) comes across, and the film shows real compassion for those people in the health industry.  Each accidental needle stick is potentially life-threatening and the film brings to the audience’s attention the threat that many hospital workers undergo every day.  It’s not something that can be explained away in an easy Hollywood pitch, and Chris Evans deserves real accolades to lending his name and stature to this kind of project.  But it’s not some made-for-TV melodrama either – the film looks for truth in the performances, and Chris Evans finds it with his outstanding work in PUNCTURE.  The Kassens have made a film that matters, is riveting, and ultimately enlightens.  PUNCTURE opens this weekend in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston.

Nordling, out.